This chapter is from the book

Activities

As you start to work with Xcode, take advantage of its productivity features such as code snippets. In particular, add your own snippets as you think of them. It generally is best not to sit down and make a list of snippets that you think you will need—that is often a waste of time. Instead, keep alert and, whenever you find yourself typing something that might be useful as a snippet, add it right then and there. These snippets are stored in your environment—not just in a single project.

Many people shy away from the debugging tools, but you will find that they can save you a large amount of time and effort. Some of them are for advanced developers but practice using breakpoints. This is a simple technology, and it is very easy to just click in the gutter of the editor to set a breakpoint. The debug area will let you examine local variables; it also will help you track the path of execution so you can see why a certain section of code is or is not being executed.